The (old) Licquia Family Blog

This is the old blog site, powered by a simple blogging system called Blosxom. It's here to keep old links from breaking, and for whatever historic interest might remain.

Here's the current site.



Wed, 11 Jun 2003

The NYT feed posts to the future!

The previous story discussed the advent of the New York Times RSS feeds to my blogroll, a happy event. But not so happy, in one way: all the NYT stories seemed to stick like glue to the very top of the blogroll. I noticed that the NYT seems to post in clusters, but even so, the cluster should move down in the blogroll just like the other blogs do.

The source of the problem: posts to the future. For example, right now, the channel's lastBuildDate is 4:31 AM GMT, or 11:31 PM EST, which makes sense (it's nearly midnight as I write). But the first item has a pubDate of 7:20 AM GMT, or 2:20 AM EST.

I don't know if this is caused by a bug in the software, or if there's something nefarious afoot. But it's easy to fix; a simple tweak to my blogroll script that disallows posts to the future solves the problem nicely. Of course, it also drops NYT posts entirely from the blogroll, but that's a self-correcting problem: once the dates are fixed, the NYT posts will take their rightful place.

Any clues as to what is causing this problem would be appreciated.

Jun 11, 2003 | Comments are no longer available